Know What Production Needs

The code's correct and the review's done, but production still needs more. A diff is full of things that won't happen on their own once it merges:

• A feature flag → a config value to set in production (an environment variable, plus a config cache rebuild).
• Sends email → a real mail provider set up, not the log driver, and a verified sending domain.
• Queued email → a worker actually running, and restarted after deploy so it picks up the new code.
• A new column → database migrations to run before (or with) the deploy.

Normally you'd try to remember all this, or keep a checklist doc that's always slightly out of date. Instead, generate the checklist from the diff itself, every time.

Build the skill by describing it. Ask your agent to create a skill that reads the diff between the current branch and main and produces a preflight checklist: everything you do or need to configure in production once it merges. Put it in a skills directory outside the project so it can be symlinked into any agent. Update it once, and every agent gets the change.

Run it, then refine it. The first output is always too much. Group the suggestions by type (email, env vars, etc.) but keep the list open so new diffs can bring new categories. Drop line numbers, use filenames sparingly, and cut the summary and postscript.

Prove it from a clean session. Quit the agent, reopen, and run /preflight-checklist directly. You should get a short, categorised list you can check off.

Share it. Push the skill to source control so your team (and any of your agents) can pull it down.